Pete Brown's Blog (POKE 53280,0)
Pete Brown writes on a variety of topics from XAML with the Windows Runtime (WinRT), .NET programming using C#, WPF, Microcontroller programming with .NET Microframework, .NET Gadgeteer, Windows on Devices, and even plain old C, to raising two children in the suburbs of Maryland, woodworking, CNC and generally "making physical stuff". Oh, and Pete loves retro technology, especially Commodore (C64 and C128). If the content interests you, please subscribe using the subscription link to the right of every page.
Archive for tag:
Web
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In this post, I'll cover the migration of this web site from a
long history of local hosting to Widows Azure Web Sites.
I've had my own personal domains (GroupLynx.com followed by
irritatedvowel.com followed by 10rem.net) since the mid 90s. Early
on, I used regular hosts. I've run my personal website out of a
succession of servers in my basement for at least a decade. It used
to b...
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So, I got this in my mailbox, entered in to the "contact me"
form on my site:
Dear Dell Web Team: Please learn to internet. The fact that you
emailed people (manually, as it's unlikely you scripted my contact
form) who linked to pages you've moved, makes me wonder how you've
made it this far. Did you also email someone at
Google/Bing/Yahoo/Ask/Excite/Lycos (blast from the past) to...
Published
Monday, July 9, 2012 |
Tagged:
Rants, Web |
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Warning: this is as much a rant as anything remotely
useful. Oh, and don't comment without reading the whole thing
:)
The Internet is not a democracy. More specifically, blog
commenting systems aren't a democracy. Blog authors and
administrators get to decide which comments show up on their
blog, and which do not. On my own blog, I remove spam
messages (or I let Akismet do it in most...
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I log into my local bank's website quite often. I transfer money
between accounts and all the usual things. Today, when I logged in,
I saw that they've decided to dump the security questions they had
us answer earlier this year and replace them with a completely new
and obscure set. If you don't set the security questions,
you can't get to your bank account.
Don't get between me and m...
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Today, due to a bug in their website which put my order through
without my credit card info (d'oh!) I got this unfriendly and
suspicious email from lego:
My first thought was this was a Phishing scam email. Why? Well,
the subject was somewhat strange, the message was plain text, but
in HTML format, it didn't contain any actual information about my
order, and it told me to take som...
Published
Wednesday, November 30, 2011 |
Tagged:
Rants, Web, Lego |
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The whole Facebook "Like" button is getting out of control. I
don't really mind sharing the "like" information with websites, but
I do mind websites that try to trick you into liking something.
It's the same lowball approach the sites that have invisible ad
click areas in the whitespace to the left and right of the page.
They aren't accurately capturing intent. You might think it's just
...
Published
Friday, November 11, 2011 |
Tagged:
Rants, Web |
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This is Windows Client Developer roundup #32.
The Windows Client Developer Roundup aggregates information of
interest to Windows Client Developers, including WPF, Silverlight, Visual C++, XNA, Expression Blend, Surface, Windows 7,
Windows Forms, Windows Phone and Visual Studio, sometimes even a
little jQuery and HTML5. If you have something interesting you've
done or have run across, o...
Published
Monday, July 12, 2010 |
Tagged:
.NET, WPF, Silverlight, XNA, ASP.NET, Web-Development, CPP, WindowsClient, WindowsClientRoundup, Windows-Phone, jQuery, WCF-RIA-Services |
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I code for fun. When I was quite a bit younger, it was pretty early in the era of personal computers, pre-PC revolution. I’ve been pretty clear about how much I loved my Commodore, so I won’t drone on and on about that here (you may breathe a sigh of relief now, but this post reads well with the theme from M.U.L.E. or better yet, a remix of Outrun playing on your headset). Ba...
Published
Saturday, January 23, 2010 |
Tagged:
.NET, Silverlight, Zune, XNA, Fun, win7, Web-Development, WindowsClient, Gadgets |
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Prior to joining Microsoft, I worked at a consulting company for a bit over 13 years. Prior to that, I started the IT department at a medical billing company and worked there for 4 years while completing my Computer Science degree. Seeing Scott’s post on past work he did years ago at SparkFun and 800.com got me to thinking about some of the interesting projects I’ve been on. I’ve been a develo...
Published
Friday, January 22, 2010 |
Tagged:
.NET, WPF, Silverlight, RIA, Expression-Blend, AIS, Facebook, Retro, ASP.NET, Web-Development, SketchFlow, Windows-Forms, CPP, WindowsClient, geek |
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If you’re on twitter or otherwise follow Codinghorror, you know he suffered a complete loss of his blog. My site and blog both have nightly database backups, but I’ve never tried to restore them, so they’re untested and therefore only slightly better than useless. I also get concerned sometimes that those backups are of a really old blogging engine’s data, an engine I’d never use again if I we...
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Today, while sitting at the kitchen table at my sister in law’s house in PA, waiting for my nephew’s 9th birthday party to kick into gear, I had a vision. By vision, I mean something along the lines of the Cheesus, chipotle Mary, chipped Jesus on toast, or Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich kinds of revelations -- but perhaps closer to the Dvorak toast. Was it a freak trick of lighting, a...
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Congratulations to the Microsoft Expression teams for another great release! If you are an MSDN Premium subscriber, you’ll probably want to wait a week or so until Expression Studio 3 show up on MSDN. That will take about a week or so. The exciting news buried in that sentence is that MSDN Premium Subscribers will get all of Expression Studio 3 (including SketchFlow) as part of their subscript...
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Since deregulation increased my electric bill by more than 100%, I’ve hated paying it. What makes it worse, though, is the really annoying workflow for the BGE online payment site. I’ve been meaning to take screenshots of the process for some time now, and just finally got around to it. First, we start at the main page at www.bge.com . You might assume that you should click the “Pay Online” li...
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Here are some of the talks I’ll be doing in the next month and a half or so. Wednesday October 22 MSDN geekSpeak webcast : Building Facebook applications with Silverlight 2 . We’ll cover some of the challenges and some tips and tidbits for building applications for Facebook platform. Join me, Glen Gordon and Andrew Duthie for this event. Saturday October 25 CMAP CodeCamp Fall Edition ...
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Andrew Duthie just published my second DevNuggets episode. In this installment, titled Styling 101, I cover the basics of styling Silverlight controls. The videos are intended to be quick, short installments following a theme starting from the very basics and getting gradually more advanced. You can view the video here. I hope you find it useful. For the curious, I use the following tools whe...
